"I want to be recognized as a Muslim. I
want to hold on to that identity.... For my parents, it was different.
They didn't have to prove it."

-- Tamana Pardais

"Your own religious faith is enriched when
you're exposed to other thoughts. I wouldn't want to live in a society
where everyone is born Muslim and dies Muslim and nothing changes, because
I don't think I would understand God."

-- Bilal Asakaryar

The first time I encountered
Sadiqa Pardais, in the lobby of the motel where she works, she was wearing
a hijab, or headscarf. She had started wearing it a few months earlier, she
explained, because it was a way to practice her religion -- and a way to know
who she is. "It's important to keep the faith I was born in, and my culture
as well," she said. Sadiqa, 22, had lived in America since she was 10.
Her family left Afghanistan when she was three years old, spent seven years
in Pakistan and then came to the United States. Adopting the hijab, Sadiqa
told me, represented a choice not to be a Muslim "only in name"
but "to practice, to be a real Muslim, and find out about my faith....
I think it's important to know who you really are." A day or so later, in the family's home
on the outskirts of Rochester, New York, Sadiqa's mother, Abida, came out
to the living room to greet me. Abida, a cheerful, vigorous woman of 47 with
curly black hair, was not wearing a scarf, and when she introduced herself,
she walked over and extended her hand for me to shake -- something most strictly
observant Muslim women would never do. It was also during that visit that
Sadiqa's father, Murtaza Pardais, a painter and art teacher, defined his identity
in capacious, humanistic terms: "I am artist. I am Muslim, I am Christian,
I am Buddhist, I am Hindu," and, for good measure, went on to list Afghanistan's
ethnic communities as well: "I am Pashtun and Tajik and Hazara... the
world is a house, a big house." Murtaza was laughing when he said this,
and no doubt in a different context he would have identified himself more
prosaically as a Muslim. Still, that expansive sense of who he is had a different
tone from Sadiqa's effort to locate herself in the single religion she defines
as hers by birth and heritage. The pattern in Sadiqa's family -- with
members of the "American" generation identifying more strongly as
Muslim, and observing religious practices more strictly, than their immigrant
parents -- is not universal but still a very noticeable one in the Pakistani
and Afghan American communities. "This is definitely a very large movement,"
said Fariba Nawa, an Afghan American journalist. When she returned home to
California after six years away reporting from post-Taliban Afghanistan, the
trend was noticeable. "I saw this change, all of a sudden... the girls
are wearing hijabs, and defining themselves through that, the guys are wearing
[Muslim-style] hats." Like several other people I talked to,
Nawa, 40, sees an Arab influence in the religious style, particularly in the
Afghan American generation just a few years younger than her own, young men
and women in their 20s or early 30s. "They've renounced Afghanness and
they take on Arab Islam... they get indoctrinated either in Muslim student
associations in college, most colleges here have them. Or they just want to
belong somehow, and this is one way. They feel that Islam is more inclusive
than being Afghan." If the style is more Arabic, though, Nawa thinks
the evolving beliefs and religious practice are not really the same as Arab
Islam but "its own distinct American Islam, and it's very conservative."
Hena Khan, a 40-year-old communications consultant and author of
children's books, doesn't cover her hair and considers herself "a pretty
mainstream moderate" Muslim. When it comes to religious practice, she
said, "I'd put myself smack in the middle, really. On the liberal to
conservative spectrum, I'd be right in the middle." Still, Khan is an
example of the trend toward stronger identification with Islamic belief and
practice. Religion is significantly more important in her life now than it
was in her Pakistani American family when she was growing up in a comfortable
Maryland suburb outside Washington, D.C. Although her parents sent her to
religious classes for long enough to learn elementary Islamic teachings, she
recalls growing up without much knowledge or understanding of the true beliefs
and values of her religion. The identity she absorbed from her family was
national and cultural rather than religious, connected to her Pakistani roots
more than to her faith. But now, Khan said, if she has to label herself, "I
don't put myself as Pakistani first. I put myself as American first, Muslim
second and Pakistani third."
It was only when she got to the University of Maryland and began
meeting Pakistani and other Muslim students with different backgrounds from
her own that Khan began seriously thinking about her faith. "I realized
how little I knew and really wanted to be more Muslim than I had been,"
she said, adding that "a lot of people I knew went through a similar
phase while they were in college. Maybe it's just part of identity formation
in general and finding yourself in that period of time when you're 18 to your
early 20s." In her own case, Khan said, she found herself leaning towards
more conservative ideas of religious practice than the ones she had grown
up with. "I started to question things, like should I wear the headscarf,
all sorts of stuff." She did not adopt the hijab but did start dressing
more modestly, no longer wearing shorts, for example, as she had done while
playing high school sports. In adult life, Khan has come to be somewhat
less preoccupied with issues of "ritual and external appearance."
But religion is a central theme in her children's books, Night
of the Moon, which explains the rituals and meaning of Ramadan through
the eyes of a 7-year-old Pakistani American girl, and Golden
Domes and Silver Lanterns: A Muslim Book of Colors, where rich illustrations
by her collaborator Mehrdokht Amini are accompanied by short verses that teach
about Islam -- e.g. "Red is the rug Dad kneels on to pray/Facing toward
Mecca, five times a day." Religion is also an important part of her family
life -- clearly more so than in her home when she was a child. A teacher comes
to the house every Sunday to teach her two children to read the Koran in Arabic,
and Khan's husband, also from a Pakistani American family, meticulously performs
the five daily prayers and observes all the required fasts. (Her own observance,
Khan admits, is not as regular as her husband's. "I fluctuate. It's always
my ambition to be more disciplined, and then I'm not.") Following his
father's example, the year their older child was 10, he also kept most of
the fasts, even though Khan told him he didn't have to fast because of his
age. "He just loved it," she said. "He loved to do it, he loved
the challenge." For many American-born or American-educated
children of Pakistani and Afghan Muslim immigrants, the turn toward a stronger
religious identity among arises in large part exactly because of the divided
world they live in. Aminah Mohammad-Arif, a Paris-based scholar who has studied
attitudes among both Muslim and Hindu immigrant communities, has observed
that a religious identity that was automatic and unexamined in the home country
is often "renegotiated, reconstructed, reinterpreted in a somewhat more
self-conscious way in the United States." Religion can also play "a
cathartic role" for many immigrants, she added. "It may help individuals
who have been socially and culturally marginalized and psychologically destabilized
by the diasporic experience to exorcise their fears and frustrations and to
find landmarks" in an unfamiliar world.[1] Many of the people I interviewed for this
report echoed that reasoning. In Pakistan, your religion is "taken for
granted," explained 31-year-old Wajahat Ali, a writer, activist and practicing
lawyer in Fremont, California. "Everyone is a Muslim. Everyone knows
the culture. You don't have to explain it, you don't have to define it, you're
not interrogated every day, you don't have to prove it. It just is."
But in America, it is not possible to be a Muslim without thinking about your
religion, because you are reminded every day that it is different from the
majority faith -- and not just different, but in the post-9/11 era, frequently
under attack. For many young Muslims that becomes a reason to "cling
to those identity markers or values that you believe will be under threat,"
Ali said. "You end up valuing it more, you end up associating with it
more. And furthermore it helps you bond with like-minded individuals. It gives
you more assets, resources, community, and so forth." Others said similar things. In Afghanistan,
people follow what they see around them, without actually studying it themselves,
said one young Afghan American woman who asked not to have her name published.
"If you're in a Muslim country, you tend to go with the majority. Here,
with so many religions, you study it more, you see what the differences are,"
and, she added, because you hear different people saying so many different
things about it, "you study it yourself" in ways that might not
happen in the homeland. Bilal Askaryar, an unusually thoughtful
27-year-old Afghan American who works for a Silicon Valley technology company,
offered this metaphor: "No matter how secular an Afghan family is, there
is still the seed of Islam in all of them, that seed is here, and living in
America lets you water it at your own rate. I think a lot of youth here have
really looked into that, because it's something they've always been curious
about. And also outside pressure is making you think about it, you can't forget.
Or you can forget, but there will be reminders every once in a while, right?"
Askaryar agrees that his generation is more religious than their parents,
but thinks being in America can make religion more meaningful for members
of the first generation, too -- his mother, for example. "She said in
Afghanistan we never learned about Islam in the same way, we just memorized
the prayers in Arabic and we didn't even memorize the meaning. But she said
here in America she's been able to attend talks and learn so much about religion
that she was raised in."
I heard exactly that story from Shahla Arsala,
who was in her mid-20s when she fled from Afghanistan with her husband and
two small children after her father, an army general before the Communist
coup, was arrested and then executed by the leftist regime. She had religious
education in school, but as with Bilal Askaryar's mother, it was rote memorization
rather than meaningful learning. Reading the Koran was just reading meaningless
sounds, because it's in Arabic, she said. Similarly when she prayed, she didn't
know what the words meant. "When I was doing prayer I'm saying it in
Arabic, I didn't know, what am I saying to God." Now, in her late 50s
and after more than three decades in California, she is studying the Koran
again. "I'm thinking I missed it, so even if I'm old, if there is an
opportunity, I want to learn." When she looks at the younger generation,
though, Arsala thinks some "have gone to the extreme" in their religious
views. The reason, she believes, is the same that drives other young people
in the opposite direction, toward rejecting their faith and culture. The ones
who tend to go to either extreme are those who "are kind of lost, caught
between two different cultures, and they don't know how find a middle way,
to be comfortable."
Unlike Hena Khan, Zahra Billoo grew up in a "more than usually
religious family." As a child in Alhambra, California, she took Koran
classes, went to the mosque every day, and began wearing a hijab at 10. In
the evenings at her home, the children "didn't watch Bollywood videos
or Disney cartoons," she told me. "Our bedtime stories were stories
of the prophets... we fell asleep to stories of Noah and Adam." When
she was 7 years old her parents took her with them on a haj, the pilgrimage
to Mecca that is a religious duty for observant Muslims. In other families
she knew, it was unusual for parents making a haj to take children that young.
But her parents "made it a priority to make sure we had the experience
of the pilgrimage," just as they made it a priority for the children
to attend mosque regularly.

"I
don't know that my conviction would have been so strong had I been surrounded
by Muslims. I had to learn my religion, I had to learn to be proud of
it, had to learn how to explain it, and that was really big part of
my experience growing up."

-- Zahra Billoo

Billoo traveled to Mecca again at 21, fulfilling the requirement that the
haj should be made after puberty. As with other religious observances, she
has the impression that her peers, the generation of American Muslims who
grew up in the United States, are more inclined to make the pilgrimage than
many of their parents were. While the immigrant generation was absorbed in
finding a livelihood and establishing themselves in their new home, members
of her generation with American educational credentials have more easily achieved
the comforts of middle-class life, including the means to make the pilgrimage
-- a choice Billoo sees as "more and more common and more and more a
priority" for her contemporaries.
Billoo, whose parents met in the United States after immigrating
separately from Pakistan in the 1970s, is now 30, a lawyer and executive director
of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of CAIR, the Council on Islamic American
Relations. She didn't always appreciate having to study and going to the mosque
when she was a child, she said, but "as an adult, I'm so grateful that
I went all the time because I think it really shaped my identity." But
she believes that being in a minority outside her home influenced her beliefs
too. She and her brother were the only practicing Muslims in their high school,
and she thinks that strengthened her faith. "I don't know that my conviction
would have been so strong had I been surrounded by Muslims," she said.
"I had to learn my religion, I had to learn to be proud of it, had to
learn how to explain it, and that was really big part of my experience growing
up."
Tamana Pardais, Sadiqa's older sister, made the same point. For
her parents, growing up in a society that was 99 percent Muslim, practicing
the religion was a normal part of daily life, she said, but for their children
in America, "it's different. We have to go to the mosque and learn."
She is studying Arabic, something her parents didn't do in Afghanistan, so
she will be able to read the Koran in the original language, and decided to
wear a headscarf because "I want to be recognized as a Muslim. I want
to hold on to that identity.... For my parents, it was different. They didn't
have to prove it."

For many young
Pakistani and Afghan Americans, as for other American Muslims, the 9/11 attacks
and the aftermath were a turning point in their religious life, as well as
for their image and identity in general. The event itself, carried out in
the name of Islam, led them to look (or look again) at their faith to find
out what it really teaches about violence or the murder of innocent people.
And the anti-Islamic response from many Americans, including political and
religious leaders, also led young Muslims to learn more about their religion
so they would have answers for the slurs -- and honest questions, too -- that
were hurled at their community.
The post-9/11 "Islamophobia machine," as Hena Khan
calls it, "sort of galvanized Muslims to challenge these views, to get
our voices out there, to correct misconceptions and fight fiction with fact."
Waleed Mansury, whose high school in Alexandria, Virginia, was barely five
miles from the Pentagon, had just graduated when 9/11 happened, and soon after
began reading religious texts. His feeling, he recalled, was: "Let me
learn my religion a little bit more... . Is it what CNN is telling me, or
is it the Koran?" Bilal Askaryar put it this way: "Because of all
that negative attention that we got, and all the attacks directed towards
Islam, we naturally found ourselves defending it, no matter how superficial
our relationship to the religion might have been in the past. We all found
ourselves defending it, and saying oh, I'm a Muslim, I may not pray five times
a day but I still believe in God and I still believe in the Prophet Mohammed
and I know those things you are saying aren't right." And, he added,
when you defend something to others, you come to believe it more strongly
yourself.
Not everyone who looked at the Koran found reassurance. One young
Afghan American woman, also of college age when the 9/11 attack took place,
feels it pushed her away from, not toward, Islam or any religious faith. In
her reading of the Koran, she found passages that when read literally, can
be understood as justifying acts of violent terror. Her family was not strongly
observant and she had never been very religious, she told me, but the attacks
were "kind of the nail in the coffin" for her own belief. With the
Koran, she concluded, "if you take it with a grain of salt, it's fine,
you can interpret a lot of it to fit the modern day," but reading the
actual words in many passages, she went on, one can "totally understand
why al-Qaeda did what they did. Reading the Koran word for word, and taking
everything literally, then absolutely they could justify what they've done."
Exactly the same, she pointed out, can be said of the Bible, which she has
also read.
A small handful of young Muslim American men who turned to religious
studies after 9/11 were drawn to a violent jihadi ideology, and a far smaller
number went on to become involved in planning or carrying out acts of terror.
But the great majority of American Muslims reached the opposite view. Reading
the Koran taught him that Islam "is not a religion of violence, not a
religion of oppression," Waleed Mansury said, and the terrorists and
the Taliban who practice violence in its name are "demonizing my religion."
Bilal Askaryar was a high school student in Newark, California, when
the 9/11 attacks occurred. With American attention suddenly riveted on his
homeland and his religion, he said, it was inevitable that he and other Afghan
and Muslim Americans were drawn to think more about their faith. "It
was on everyone's mind," he said. "We Muslims ourselves wanted to
understand how could someone claim to be speaking for us when they do something
so vile." The beliefs he had been taught were at complete odds with those
that motivated the 9/11 terrorists: "The way I was raised, the most defining
virtues of God are that he's merciful and gracious. The two most repeated
words in the Koran, after the name of God, are mercy and grace. It's not a
religion of terrorism or violence or hurting anyone" -- or, he added,
intolerance toward other religions. "Every religion says that it's the
truth," Askaryar said, "but one thing that I respect about Islam
and the prophet Mohammed is that one of his most famous sermons was 'to you
your religion and to me mine.' We have separate religions but we can still
be neighbors, those are his words. To you your religion and me in mine. Islam
of course teaches that that's best way to God. But it doesn't deny other religions,
that there's truth in other religions, and it also says to be humble and remember
that before God none of us is better and no one has monopoly on truth, and
to always treat everyone else in the best way that you can."
Reassuring themselves that the Islam they believe in is a humane
religion -- and not the violent, fanatical one Americans are often told it
is -- does not mean that Askaryar or other young American Muslims are blind
to the violence and fanaticism that clearly exist in the Islamic world. At
the same time he found himself becoming more committed to his vision of his
religion after 9/11, he said, "I can't deny that I was disheartened by
seeing horrible things done by Muslims in the name of Islam.... It was disheartening
and it was frustrating, it also made me realize how different I was from a
lot of Muslims. I talked to my cousins who grew up similarly to me, and we
were trying figure out what is it that makes us different from groups of Muslims
that are so reactionary, so unthinking."
Even though they were sparked by the wave of intolerant anti-Islamic
attitudes in post-9/11 American life, those questions led Askaryar to appreciate
American values and principles more deeply, not less. Along with making him
feel more strongly Muslim, his introspection after 9/11 also "made me
cognizant of being American," he said. "Here in America, we were
able to think about our religion for ourselves and to read Koran for ourselves
and come to our understanding, seek out leaders we want. In other countries
either they only have extremist leaders, or they aren't allowed to question
what they're taught, or they don't even have the means -- if you're worried
about feeding yourself, you don't have the luxury of trying to think about
the philosophy of religion."
Askaryar's experience also led him to value American diversity
and pluralism. "Societies are stronger" if they are not homogeneous,
he said. "Your own religious faith is enriched when you're exposed to
other thoughts. I wouldn't want to live in a society where everyone is born
Muslim and dies Muslim and nothing changes, because I don't think I would
understand God."
Tamana Pardais knows that it takes "some courage to identify
yourself as Muslim" in America. But like Askaryar, she is thankful for
the American freedoms that let her find her own way and make her own choices.
"I can practice my religion freely here," she told me. "I can
breathe here." Her decision to wear a headscarf was important to her,
but it was also important that the decision was hers, not forced on her by
religious authorities or social pressure. She is grateful that in America
"we don't have police out there who are forcing me into the dress code,
like in Iran." And she is also grateful for the many other choices she
can make as an American that would have been far less possible in Afghanistan
-- finishing her education, not being pushed by custom or family pressure
to marry in her mid-teens, like the female cousins she met there and in Pakistan
a few years ago who at Tamana's age, 25, "have five or six children and
were never able to finish school." By contrast, in America, Tamana was
able to graduate from college, majoring in women's and gender studies, and
hopes to go on for a master's in counseling or perhaps Islamic studies. That
sense of her right to make her own choices and chart her own course seems
as much a part of her as her religion: "My American identity goes hand
in hand with my Muslim identity.... I treasure the freedom I have," she
said, and added firmly: "I'm American."

In my interviews
for this report, the line from the Koran that was mentioned more often than
any others was this one: "There is no compulsion in religion."
Waleed Mansury quoted that verse. So did a full-bearded young
Pakistani American named Shahid Bhatti, whom I met in an inner-city mosque
in Albany, NY, and who is the most devout and conservative believer of all
the people I spoke with. So did Rohina Malik, the Pakistani American playwright
and actress. For her, she said, the idea that religion cannot be compelled
represents "what I love in Islam" and is in fact the core of true
religious belief. "I feel like anytime there's compulsion in religion
it makes people hate the religion and hate the rules and hate the faith."
As an example, she said, her one-woman play "Unveiled," in which
she portrays various women who express their faith (as Malik does) by wearing
a headscarf, sometimes angers playgoers who come from more repressive Muslim
societies. At times when there are Iranians in the audience, for example,
she has gotten "a very negative response from them, saying well, it's
OK for you to say these things about the veil, but we come from a country
where we're forced. So they get very angry toward me.... I understand that
the anger is coming from this whole idea of being forced, whereas for me the
veil was never something that was forced on me so I have a different view
of it."
Another person who cited that verse from the Koran was Sabira
Qureshi. Qureshi doesn't quite count as a Pakistani American. She's a Pakistani
citizen whose husband, also Pakistani, works for the World Bank in Washington,
D.C. But she has lived in the United States for a long time, most of her
husband's close relatives immigrated many years ago and are U.S. citizens,
her children all went to college here (and the youngest attended an American
high school as well), so Qureshi has many connections with the Pakistani American
community and, if from a slightly different perspective, has shared much of
the Pakistani American experience.
For Qureshi, the injunction that "there is no compulsion
in religion" is also central to understanding the Muslim faith -- an
understanding she thinks is completely missing in the common American stereotypes
of Islam and what many Americans believe to be Islamic law, or Shari'a. True
Shari'a is not compulsion but its opposite, Qureshi argues. The word
means "a path, the right path. I don't need a law to tell me the difference
between right and wrong. If I want to follow something that's written in the
Koran, I'll do it. If I want to give certain proportion of my salary to charity
as ordained in the Koran, I'll do it. I don't need a law to do that."
And, she went on, religious rules cannot be enforced by state power. If they
are, that changes the essential meaning of Shari'a -- even if religious movements
in many Muslim countries do want to establish Shari'a-based legal systems.
"You don't legislate belief," Qureshi said. "You
don't legislate lifestyle." Muslims have to decide for themselves how
to live, she believes; if they are not allowed to do that, they cannot truly
live by their beliefs. "The whole concept of my faith, the test of my
faith, is my choice between right and wrong. If you take away my choice then
I no longer have that right to choose, you're deciding for me."
It's impossible to know whether I would have heard as often or
as much about "no compulsion in religion" if I had been asking those
questions in Pakistan or Afghanistan instead of in the United States. Certainly
there and in all Muslim countries there are many people who value the right
to think and choose for themselves, and who would agree more with Qureshi
about the nature of Shari'a and how to enforce it than with the positions
taken by the Taliban or similar fundamentalist groups. Still, listening to
Tamana Pardais and Rohina Malik and many others, I felt I was hearing American
voices expressing an American experience of searching freely, in a land of
many beliefs and many identities, for what they believe and who they are.

"Look
at any icon of Mary and her hair is covered. And the world is fine with
that, but a Muslim woman, she's oppressed. The girl goes, 'But nuns
wear it for God.' Who do you think I wear it for, the bloody Queen of
England?!"

-- "Shabana," a character in
Rohina Malik's play "Unveiled"

None of this is to say that living as a believing Muslim in America is easy
or uncomplicated. It may not be hard to live in this country and say the daily
prayers or not eat pork or drink alcohol, but other issues are much less clear-cut
-- the rights and status of women, for example. For young people like Bilal
Askaryar and Tamana Pardais and their peers, defining their religious identity
also means finding the line between true religious principles and practices
that their faith requires them to follow, and national or tribal or cultural
traditions that can be adapted to fit in the American culture they are living
in. That's a distinction their immigrant parents often don't see in the same
way, if they see it at all, since in their upbringing, culture and faith were
typically undifferentiated.
To the extent that the second generation is more distant from traditions
and practices in their ancestral homelands, they may find it easier to distinguish
faith from custom. "I think that they are more able to separate the religious
values from the cultural values of those countries," said Saqib Ali,
a Pakistani American who belongs to that generation. "For the immigrant
generation, perhaps, it isn't as easy for them to separate being Pakistani
with Muslim or being Arab with Muslim or Afghan with Muslim, because their
identities are fused." American Muslims like himself who grew up in America,
Ali believes, "feel like they can let go of the immigrant baggage and
maintain their religious identity," not just preserving their faith,
he feels, but reaching a purer version of it. Still, young Muslim Americans
seeking to define what their religion really is and which rules to follow
have to figure it out for themselves -- and with no clear road map, either
from their parents or from religious leaders who, up to now, are also likely
to come from the immigrant generation.
"For me it's very important to separate my religion from
my culture," said 25-year-old Sufia Alnoor. But it is also confusing.
Once, she remembered, in a television program she was watching with her grandmother,
there was a scene in which a man hit his wife. It made her grandmother furious,
Alnoor said. "She was like, 'he's a coward, he has no pride.' I thought
that was really interesting. She's an elderly Afghan woman and in her mindset,
it's wrong for a man to hit a woman. But then I'm thinking, OK, all this news
I hear about the Taliban hitting women, and they say it's the religion....
It's just so mixed, honestly. I feel the more and more I try to understand
Afghan culture, the more and more confused I get. Really, it's so complicated."
Mizgon Shahir Darby, who was trained as a journalist but now directs
the mental health program for the Afghan Coalition in Fremont, California,
sees young Afghan Americans trying to find their own path, "picking and
choosing what's right and what's wrong in culture and religion, and they're
negotiating it." But, she went on, "there is no handbook on how
to be a good Afghan girl or boy, but then everyone expects it." The result,
often, is confusion and generational conflict, sometimes open, sometimes hidden,
and all the more painful because it occurs in a culture that puts great value
on family name and reputation. "Name, honor, image, play a huge role"
in Afghan families, a young woman named Maryam Ufyani told me. "You don't
hurt the honor of your family." Khalid Shekib, who came to the United
States as a small child, grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington and
now practices law there, explained: "In Afghan culture, a lot of times
if a kid does something wrong, they don't really blame the kid. They always
look at the family and say the family is not raising their children properly.
It always goes back to family" -- so that if a daughter dresses immodestly,
by traditional standards, or goes out on dates, it is not just a question
of her turning away from custom and culture; to her parents, she is bringing
shame not just on herself but on them as well.
Not infrequently, instead of confrontation, families respond to
such situations by not speaking about them. As I was told in more than one
conversation, there is a sort of conspiracy of concealment, "a culture
of silence and secrecy," Mizgon Darby calls it, in which parents know
that a son is drinking or a daughter is dating, and the children know their
parents know, but no one ever says it out loud. That silence may avoid open
conflict, but it surely does not lessen the pain.
During one of my first interviews for this report, I had an unexpected
glimpse of just how sharp and hurtful the clash of cultures within a family
can be. I had just spent an hour or so talking with a young woman just past
college age and her mother -- I won't identify them any further -- in the
living room of their modest home. We had finished our talk and I was about
to walk out the front door when the younger brother appeared on the stairs,
coming down from his second-floor bedroom. Behind him came his American girlfriend,
who it became obvious had been sharing the room with him. I had already said
goodbye to the young man's mother and did not see her reaction. But his sister,
who had walked to the door with me, stepped outside and explained that her
brother's issues with the family were not just about his girlfriend. He had
also rebelled against the family's religion, making friends with a group of
Christian students at his community college and for a time, she said, wearing
a chain with a cross around his neck. (Whether the girlfriend was a cause
or a consequence of that rebellion -- or unconnected to it -- I did not learn.)
Not surprisingly, this caused very serious conflict in the family. But her
parents in the end had to resign themselves to living with her brother's attitudes
and his girlfriend's overnight visits, his sister said, for one reason: if
they hadn't, they feared they would lose their son completely.
There is no way to know with certainty how common that kind of cultural
and generational collision is behind the walls of Afghan or Pakistani American
or other Muslim American homes. But there can be little doubt that the situation
I accidentally glimpsed that morning, or something like it, must occur in
many families' lives.
It's also likely that the outcome in that particular family -- and
almost certainly in most others, too -- would have been quite different if
the child who strayed from religion and custom had been a girl instead of
a boy. The prevailing perception is that girls are in general more successful
than boys at navigating between the world of their immigrant families and
the American world outside. But that doesn't mean the pressures on girls are
any less. As in many cultures, girls may be more dutiful, more motivated to
please their parents, more conscientious and harder working in school, and
less likely to use drugs or break laws. Girls tend to care more than boys
about "what will people think, what is so-and-so gonna think about me,"
Mizgon Darby said. But, she went on, in the double life that immigrants' children
often lead, girls are also "trained to lie. They love their parents so
much that they don't want to break their parents' hearts by being who they
are. But at same time they're in American culture. They're going to date,
they're going to have relationships, they're going to do these things, and
they have to hide it. It's hard."
It's symbol, not substance, but the question of wearing a hijab, or
headscarf,[2]
often seems a metaphor for the complexities of growing up in America as a
young Muslim woman. I cannot verify this, but I had a sense that like many
other things, the hijab issue may loom larger for Muslim American women than
it would in their ancestral homelands -- if for no other reason than in America,
it's not imposed by law or custom or social pressure, so that every woman
has to decide for herself whether to cover her hair or not. The women I spoke
with had so many different ideas about the rules and so many different reasons
for wearing or not wearing a hijab that in the end, the only thing that truly
seemed clear was that on this subject, nothing is clear.
"I don't wear the hijab," one young woman told me, "but
I hope someday I will have the courage to do it." She does not want her
real name published; I will call her Darya. "It's not easy to do in this
society," she said. "If you're not in an Islamic country, it's difficult.
If you have the hijab on, people look at you differently. Even Afghans. They
fight about the hijab," she said, and about whether the Koran clearly
requires women to wear it or not. "I've seen the way people judge the
person who wears the hijab," she went on. "They expect them to be
angel-like. If you have on the hijab, they expect you not to make mistakes
ever.... A person sees a girl wearing a hijab but with tight pants, or talking
to a guy, they say she's a hypocrite. If she has it on her head, people are
more critical."
For a couple of years, Darya
did put on a hijab during Ramadan, but found that even other Afghan Americans
criticized her. In her own mind, she said, "I do believe God's words,"
and she accepts that wearing the hijab "is part of Islam," so not
wearing one is following "what people want me to do rather than what
God wants me to do." That makes her sad. "I do constantly ask God,"
she said. "I hope to do it one day.... if I lived in an Islamic country,
I would definitely wear the hijab, no question about it."
Darya wrestles with other issues, too -- such as how to behave while
interacting with men. Under strict Islamic standards of modest conduct, a
man should look down when speaking to a woman, not making eye contact, and
there should be no physical contact such as a handshake. But Darya recognizes
that that is simply not practical in dealing with the non-Muslim men she sees
every day in her workplace. "Islam doesn't forbid interaction, it just
forbids inappropriate interaction," she said, so as long as there is
no disrespectful intention, she thinks it's OK to follow American custom and
shake hands or look directly at a man she is talking to.
Rohina Malik would be more comfortable not shaking hands with men,
but frequently feels she can't avoid it. "It's an awkward situation in
this society," she said. "It can be very awkward for me to say we
don't do that in my religion... so I end up shaking hands, most of the time.
Sometimes I sort of place my hands on my heart, and sort of bend my head like
a bow, and that sometimes is an indication people get that we don't shake.
But it just depends where I am. You can't always do that." Islam, she
added, teaches that actions are judged by intentions -- "you will get
reward or punishment for what you intend." So, since God sees her intentions,
"I think that's what makes it OK for me to do what I gotta do."
When I asked what she tells her daughters on that issue, Malik replied,
"We haven't had that discussion. I would tell them to just" -- and
she left the sentence uncompleted. "I don't know. I'm not sure."
Naheed Hasnat, a 40-year-old Pakistani American writer living in the
San Francisco area, doesn't wear a hijab. When she looks at young women who
do, she sees it as a mark of identity that is generational as much as it is
religious. "The parents, like my mother's generation, weren't covering
their hair, but their daughters are," Hasnat said. (Her own generation,
as she sees it, "is in the middle... I would say we're more even-keeled."
Her description of her own religious practice sounded that way too. She thinks
of herself as a practicing Muslim, she said, but not 100 percent observant:
"I don't do what I'm not supposed to do, but I don't do everything I'm
supposed to do.") In the aftermath of 9/11 when young American Muslims
were reexamining their connection with their faith, Hasnat agrees that many
became more spiritual or religious. But she also saw a trend toward looking
more like Muslims: "college students becoming more outwardly Muslim looking,
more girls are covering their hair, boys are growing beards... I think it's
more a reaction to the political situation than it is anything else."
For Rohina Malik, though, deciding to cover her hair had to do with her inner
life, not her outward identity. "I think it was just something between
me and God," she said. "For me it was like an act of worship to
God."
Making the headscarf issue even more complicated is the fact that for
many non-Muslims, the hijab or other forms of the veil are not symbols of
belief, but of oppression -- specifically, oppression of women. In Iran, or
Saudi Arabia, or Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan or Pakistan, there
is certainly good reason for that perception. But listening to Muslim women
who wear the hijab in America, I heard over and over again that they are not
wearing it because someone has forced them to.

"The stereotype
of Muslim women is that they're forced to wear the veil," Malik said,
"but for most of us, at least my friends and the people I know, it's
usually the opposite, families opposing the daughter putting on the veil."
One of the characters in her play, a rapper named Shabana, wears a hijab over
her family's objections -- a story that is quite common but, Malik says, seldom
told. "A lot of people would never even think of that kind of scenario.
They would always think maybe it's the mom forcing the daughters or the dad
forcing the daughters, which does happen... that's the problem with stereotypes,
often they do come from a truth, it's not that they don't come from a truth,
but it's not everybody's truth." Shabana, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants
in London, also defies stereotypes in being a hip-hop performer who raps about
her life as a Muslim woman -- including wearing the veil, and the false perception
that it's not her choice. (One of her lines says: "Look at any icon of
Mary and her hair is covered. And the world is fine with that, but a Muslim
woman, she's oppressed. The girl goes, 'But nuns wear it for God.' Who do
you think I wear it for, the bloody Queen of England?!")
Her characters are not her, but Malik has some things in common
with Shabana. She was also born in England, living there until her family
moved to the United States when she was 15, and like Shabana, she met some
resistance from her family when she decided to wear the hijab. At the time,
her mother did not cover her hair, and was uncomfortable when Malik and her
sisters began to do so. But eventually, she followed her daughters' example.
"She saw me, then my other sister, then my other sister put on the veil,
and then something happened within her own spirituality and she put it on
last."
Just as her mother did not decide for her, Malik does not intend
to decide for her own three daughters. "My eldest daughter is 9, and
I've had some more devout women say to me oh, she should be covered, and I
would say, you know what, she's 9.... It bothers me when some parents are
really really really encouraging their children to cover and wear the hijab,
because I feel like that's their childhood. I understand they're trying to
prepare them for life when hopefully they'll be covered, because that's what
they believe, but I feel like it should be every woman's choice -- the choice
of a woman, not a girl.... For us womanhood begins at puberty. When a woman
gets her period, technically, that is when she is required to wear the hijab,
[but] many women don't. Some women take a couple of years after that before
they'll put it on, and some women will take 20 years after that, and some
women will never put it on. But I've made it very clear to my daughters that
this is something between you and God." She also makes it clear that
they should consider their decision carefully and make it seriously. "You
see some women who start wearing the hijab and they take it off, and then
they're wearing it again and then they're taking it off. Rather than do that
it's better give it some time, give it some thought. When you feel like you
want to wear it, then wear it, and if you don't, don't."

-0-

Following are stories
I heard about three young men's journeys into their faith. I only met one
of them in person. Mohammad Hassan Khalid's story was told to me by his lawyer,
with some details taken from news accounts. The journey of the young man I'll
call Naim was described by his sister. The third story, Shahid Bhatti's, I
heard directly from him.

Mohammad Hassan Khalid: The Khalid family's story in the United
States, Jeff Lindy said, could have been a chapter in a textbook on the American
dream. He might have added that it could also be in a book on the Pakistani
diaspora.
Lindy, a defense lawyer in Philadelphia, represented Mohammad Khalid
after he was arrested and charged with conspiring to provide material support
to terrorists. Before his arrest, Mohammad was an honors student at his Maryland
high school and had been accepted, with a full scholarship, to Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore. He was not yet 16 when he committed the acts he was
charged for, and 18 when he stood in a federal courtroom in May 2012 and pleaded
guilty to the charge -- a heartbreaking end to what might have been a hopeful
tale of immigrant parents' hardship and sacrifice helping their child create
a rewarding life in America.
When Mohammad was small, his father, Khalid Mehmood, took the family
to the United Arab Emirates, a magnet for Pakistanis seeking better employment
than they can find at home. They lived there until Mohammad was 11, when they
returned to Pakistan. Not long afterward Mehmood emigrated again to the United
States, where he worked for several years saving money to bring his wife and
children to join him. As with the great majority of Pakistani immigrants,
educating the children was a top priority. Mehmood searched for the best school
district he could afford to live in, and settled on Maryland's Howard county,
west of Baltimore. It's one of the richest counties in America (fifth in some
rankings, third in others) and a high-priced housing market for a family with
modest means. The Khalids' home in Ellicott City is a crowded two-bedroom
townhouse apartment where, Lindy said, Mohammad and his older brother shared
a mattress in one room and their two sisters sleep in a back room next to
a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves jammed with miscellaneous items their father
sells at a local flea market, supplementing his income from delivering pizzas.
In the classic pattern of Asian immigrant families, their parents constantly
pushed the Khalid children to become star students. Mohammad, like his brother
and sisters, did very well in school. But he had a much harder time than his
siblings, Lindy said, in becoming comfortable in American life. "He was
a fish out of water. His brother and sisters were able to adapt better; he
had trouble adjusting... he had a hard time putting down roots." He kept
up his studies and remained on his school's honor roll, but became increasingly
moody and withdrawn, symptoms that would eventually be diagnosed as depressive
disorder.
Out of that feeling of isolation, Lindy said, Mohammad "reached
out for something familiar, and that was Islam." He began exploring Islamic
sites on the Internet and, inevitably, found some that espoused extreme, militant
doctrines. Over time he made his way into progressively more secure chat rooms
focused on fighting a holy war to protect Islam against U.S. aggression and
decadent, corrupt Western ideas. Using the Arabic he had learned as a child
in the Emirates, Mohammed translated various documents and statements from
Arabic or English into Urdu. His translations included at least one speech
by Osama bin Laden, along with other videotaped material from al-Qaeda. He
posted his own writings as well, highly emotional tracts proclaiming the spiritual
superiority of Islam and denouncing corrupt American culture and values. They
reflected, in Lindy's view, a young, emotionally troubled mind "intensely
interested in ideology, intensely exploring ideology." And as he became
increasingly radicalized, Lindy believes, identifying with the jihadi cause
and the attention and praise he received "made him feel good and important."
For a lonely, alienated teenager, that was a powerful drug.
Alongside his diatribes, Mohammad put up videotapes circulated by al-Qaeda
and other groups showing attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, or
other scenes sending a similar message. He also chatted with other jihad sympathizers,
musing on one occasion about an apparent daydream of carrying out a mass shooting
at his high school, where, he wrote, many students' parents worked for the
National Security Agency and "all the security agencies of amrika."
His family didn't know just what he was doing, but they grew increasingly
disturbed at how much time he was spending on the Internet. At one point,
right around the time of Mohammad's 16th birthday, his parents took away his
laptop. His response was extreme, to the point that he was hospitalized, first
in a medical facility and then in a psychiatric hospital.
In the course of his Internet explorations Mohammad had established
contact with a small group including a woman from Pennsylvania named Colleen
R. LaRose, who in a twist that sounds like something from a comic strip rather
than from real life, identified herself on the Internet as Jihad Jane. She
and several others were involved in a bumbling plot to assassinate a Swedish
artist, Lars Vilks, who had outraged Muslims by drawing an image of the Prophet
Mohammed with the body of a dog. The plot was never carried out, and Mohammad
never met any of the other plotters in person. But after a series of messages
to and from LaRose, he posted online appeals for funds that were intended
for her project. Several weeks later, according to the federal indictment,
LaRose sent him a package containing a stolen U.S. passport along with "other
documents and material,"
which Mohammad was supposed to send to another co-conspirator in Europe. For
some reason, Mohammad kept the passport and hid it instead of sending it.
But he did send the rest of the material, including, one of Lindy's associates
said, some rare coins that were presumably to be sold to raise funds for the
operation against Vilks. Legally, that was the most damning act, since it
clearly crossed the line from expressing support to actively assisting the
planned assassination.
If helping Jihad Jane was a crucially
wrong turn in Mohammad's life, there was another turn yet to come in his spiritual
journey. In their alarm after the confrontation over his laptop and Mohammad's
hospitalization, his family asked the imam at their mosque for help. The imam
in turn began to meet with Mohammad, Jeff Lindy said, and little by little
learned what the boy had been doing. And when he did, as Lindy tells it, the
imam told Mohammad, in effect: "You have this wrong." In their conversations,
the imam patiently explained why the jihadi ideology Mohammad had embraced
does not represent true Islamic beliefs. For every Koranic quote the jihadis
cite to justify their violence, Lindy said, "the imam would point out
why it didn't mean death to infidels, it meant something more peaceful."
And ultimately, Lindy believes, Mohammad was convinced. It was hard to give
up the attention and approval he had been getting, but in the end, "this
guy saved Mohammad's life. He turned him around."
Lindy thinks the Mohammad he came
to know is not the terrorist he once hoped to be. "He now is a very spiritual,
very knowledgeable Muslim who I don't think is a jihadist." The day of
Mohammad's guilty plea, Lindy told a reporter: "This is the saddest case
I've ever been involved in."

Naim: When I heard his story from his older sister in California,
Naim was in Saudi Arabia. He was studying there at the University of Medina,
in the third year of a six-year program in Islamic jurisprudence.
He comes back in the summers to California,
where he was born and brought up, his sister told me. So when summer came,
I wrote her and asked if he was home and if he might be willing to tell me
about his life himself. She relayed my request, but he declined. "He's
a far more private person compared to his sister," her e-mail said. That
made me think he would probably be more comfortable if I didn't use his real
name; Naim is a pseudonym. I'll call his sister Yasmin, also not her real
name.
Naim and Yasmin are the children of Pakistani
immigrants who settled in California in the early 1980s. Their parents are
devout Muslims, active in their mosque. When Naim was five or six years old,
a "recruiter" came to the mosque looking for parents who were willing
to send their sons back to Pakistan for religious education. (Yasmin doesn't
like the word recruiter, which she thinks can feed negative stereotypes of
Muslims. But she agrees that that's what they are.) Naim's father liked the
idea, as did the father of another little boy who was Naim's friend. The mothers
were not so enthusiastic, Yasmin said. "The idea of sending their babies
to another country where they hadn't lived in a decade was really frightening
for them." But the boys were excited and wanted to go, particularly since
they could go together. In the end the families sent them off, and the boys
spent ten months in Pakistan attending a madrassa, or religious school, where
the entire curriculum consisted of learning to recite the Koran by heart,
in Arabic. During his time there, Yasmin said, Naim memorized about one-fourth
of the Koran -- the words, that is, but not the meaning, since boys that young
were not taught the language, just to repeat and remember the sounds of the
words.
When the boys returned to their families,
their parents learned that they had been regularly beaten in the madrassa
-- this despite explicit promises from the recruiters that there would be
no corporal punishment. Naim's parents were horrified. Physical discipline
is common in South Asian homes but in her family, Yasmin said, she and Naim
were never hit or spanked, so the beatings in the madrassa must have been
all the more traumatic, not just physically but emotionally as well. The boys
had relatives living in the same town whom they were allowed to visit every
two weeks, but during those visits they never told anybody about their treatment
at the school. "To have never been beaten your entire life and then...
being beaten for a year" and never speaking about it left the boys in
emotional turmoil for a long time -- as long as two years, Yasmin believes
-- after they came home.
Naim does not excuse the madrassa teachers'
abuse, but it did not turn him against the Koran or Islam. "It distanced
him from a certain type of religious leader," but not his faith, Yasmin
said. Her family knows other young people who fell away from Muslim practice
after being mistreated by religious teachers, but it didn't happen with Naim,
and Yasmin thinks that's because of what he heard from adults at home about
the abuse at the madrassa. "Religious leaders in our community and our
parents were very clear that this did not have anything to do with the religion,
that this was wrong, and the religion was what informed their own understanding
of it being wrong," she said, and that "gave him a really solid
grounding in religion." Long afterward, Yasmin said, her brother remains
ambivalent about the madrassa. "I think he looks at it like the darkest
chapter of his life," but there is also "some level of gratefulness
for that experience" -- he hates the way his teachers treated him, but
at the same time he values what they taught him and is thankful to them for
opening the door to religious learning.
Back in California, Naim returned to his public elementary school
and also continued his Koran studies, though at a slower pace than in the
madrassa (Yasmin thinks he was about 12 when he finished memorizing the entire
text). Through high school, Yasmin said, Naim was observant, keeping the required
fasts even when they coincided with his basketball team's schedule. But her
sense is that he did not think of himself as intensely religious, just someone
who had learned a lot about the religion. "He was just sort of an average
American teenager" with an unusual level of religious knowledge, but
not unusually spiritual. It was after he entered college, she said, that he
began to be more seriously committed to the faith. After his freshman year
he went to Egypt for a year, learning fluent Arabic. He returned to his California
college for one more semester, then decided to enroll at the University of
Medina.
Ultimately, Yasmin said, her brother
and others like him will bring a new leadership for Muslims in the United
States, succeeding today's religious leaders who are still largely immigrants
from Islamic countries who came to minister to the immigrant generation in
the American Muslim community. For younger Muslims who were born or grew up
in America, those leaders may be respected but are also on the far side of
a wide gap in experience, culture and consciousness. Naim, Yasmin thinks,
will be "part of a generation of American religious leaders who will
have a grounding in American culture, and therefore will be able to better
relate to the community they serve."
As a member of the American generation, Yasmin feels she would
connect better with someone like her brother as a religious leader because
"he doesn't have an accent, he was born and raised in the United States,
he understands basketball and various pop culture issues that someone who
not from the U.S. can't understand." She would feel that way even if
Naim weren't her sibling, Yasmin said, though the example she gave was from
their life as sister and brother: when she wanted to go to her high school
prom -- wearing a headscarf and not with a date -- her parents were against
it, but Naim "stuck up for me" and in the end she was able to go.
On that particular issue, Yasmin admitted wryly, Naim might not take the same
position now. But he still has the experience of growing up in America and
will understand that generation in ways no immigrant could.
When I asked Yasmin if Naim's choice
to study in Saudi Arabia reflected alienation from American life, she shook
her head. "I think it's a way of integration, actually," she said.
"I think it's part of the Americanization of Muslims. He's going to be
this kid who went to an American high school, who played varsity basketball....
He has this American experience but also he can balance that with a traditional
understanding of Islam and then provide service to the American Muslim community
in a way that maybe someone who's a recent Pakistani immigrant might not be
able to."
I can't be certain that Naim would answer the same way,
but for Yasmin, her brother's journey toward a religious life does not represent
a rejection of American culture or his American identity. It's the reverse,
she said, "a desire to see how you balance the two." And, as I realized
in writing down her words, whatever the specific details in an individual
life, that is the journey all Muslim Americans have to take.

Shahid Batti: As a child,
Shahid Bhatti lived in several different worlds, but could never quite fit
into any of them.
At times Shahid lived with his Pakistani
father. At times he lived with his American grandmother in Georgia, miles
from any other Muslims. (Shahid knew he was Muslim, but the only thing he
knew about it was that he wasn't supposed to eat pork.) For two different
periods he lived with relatives in Pakistan. In all those places, he had trouble
adjusting. He wasn't mean or aggressive, didn't lose his temper or get into
fights, but he was one of those kids who just couldn't sit still and couldn't
follow the rules, particularly the one about attending school.
From a very early age Shahid was happier spending time with animals
than with human company. As much as he could, he tried to live outdoors instead
of in a classroom. In Pakistan, he told me, he would walk into his school
in the morning and keep going through the building and out the back door,
then spend his day wandering around after the flocks of goats that roamed
the town streets. When he heard the school bell ring at the end of classes,
he'd come back to the school, walk through the building from back to front,
and go home. At the end of the term no report card came to his relatives'
home, he said, and when his uncle went to the school to ask why, he was told
that no one had seen Shahid since the day he registered. He did much the same
thing in Albany, New York, where his father owned a halal grocery and then
a convenience store. Instead of going to school in the morning Shahid would
go straight to Washington Park and stay all day, catching crayfish and other
small creatures in and around the small lake in the park's western corner.
Shahid's father came to Albany from Dalton, Georgia, where he had worked
in a carpet factory and lived with Shahid's Irish-American mother, whom he
met and married after entering the country illegally by walking away from
the ship he had arrived on as a seaman. His mother died when Shahid was very
young but he continued to have a relationship with his American grandmother,
going back and forth from his father's home in Albany to live with her in
Georgia from time to time.
Shahid's affinity for wild creatures continued beyond his childhood.
Indeed, on the day that changed his life, the last thing he did before leaving
one world for another was to collect some pet snakes he had been keeping in
his Albany apartment and release them in a nearby patch of woods.
Shahid still has the notebook where he wrote about that day and
some of what followed. It was in the spring of 2002, a few weeks before his
25th birthday. He was making his living as a taxi driver, struggling with
a disastrous first marriage and with the beginnings of emotional swings that
would later be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. His journal begins

Day 1. I came home from work and saw a car pull up with three
guys with beards. They were dressed like Muslims. I went up to the car and
said salamaleikum. They got out of the car and we went to my uncle’s garage.
They were talking about Islam and that there was going to be a talk about
it in the masjid. They asked me to go with them. At first I said I couldn’t
then I thought it would be good if I did. When I got there we prayed and someone
gave a short bian[the Urdu word for a speech] about Islam.
Then I spoke with a guy named Hashir and told him my situation. He suggested
that I go to Pakistan with him and learn about Islam. So that night we went
back to my house. I got my money and some clothes. The next morning we were
off to NYC. That day I got my passport, visa and plane ticket. The next day
I was on a plane on my way to Pakistan.

The men in the car were from an organization called Tablighi Jamaat,
a movement founded in India in the 1920s that seeks to bring "lost"
Muslims back to the faith. (In accord with their founder's motto, "O
Muslims! Become Muslims," they never proselytize among non-Muslims. Shahid
told me he now thinks that's not exactly in accord with true Islamic teachings,
because as he understands it, Muslims are supposed to bear witness for their
religion to all people.)
At the time, Shahid's religious views were, by his description, unformed
and deeply confused. He didn't eat pork because "God says don't eat it,
that's the only thing I knew about Islam. On the other hand, I was drinking....
my cousins are eating pork rinds and I'm like no, no, give me a beer."
He may not have gotten along very well with formal education, but Shahid was
an intelligent, thoughtful person who was not satisfied just to be told what
to do and what not to do, which had been his Muslim relatives' approach to
teaching him the religion. "If I didn't understand something, I wanted
to know what and why and where. Like before you eat, you say 'bismillah,'
'in the name of Allah.' Now if I don't know why I'm doing this, if I don't
know what it means, I'm not doing it. That was my attitude." When someone
told him to say "bismillah" before a meal he wanted them to tell
him why, "instead of saying just shut up and say it.... Like with the
Koran, they say memorize it, recite it, but don't understand any of what it
says. Because they themselves don't know. For generation after generation
all they've been doing is reciting it and memorizing it and then they don't
know anything about it, don't act upon it, just recite it and memorize it.
I didn't want that. If I don't understand it I didn't want to do it, that
was the mentality I had."
Shahid began thinking more about practicing the religion when
he married a non-Muslim American who converted to Islam. But, he said, "when
I got married I had no knowledge of what Islam was. All I knew was what my
family practiced. I tried to implement what my family was doing, but that
was a disaster.... the things my family was doing, a lot of things are opposite
of what Islam teaches." One of those, he told me in another conversation,
was the idea that the husband is the ruler in the family and the wife has
to obey, which he now sees as un-Islamic because it goes against the teaching
that there is no compulsion in religion. Once in a while he went to the mosque,
but because he had never had religious instruction he didn't know much about
the rituals or their meaning. "I would just do what other people were
doing, and then I would leave. So I wasn't really connected."
When he met the Tablighi Jamaat missionaries,
Shahid and his wife had just separated, which also contributed to his impulsive
decision to go with them to Pakistan. There, he spent part of his time with
a group of several hundred Muslims from around the world receiving instruction
at the Tablighi center in Raiwind, near Lahore, and part traveling with smaller
groups to visit mosques and meet with people in different cities to talk about
what they had been taught. Tablighi promotes a deeply conservative, fundamentalist
form of Islam, holding, as Shahid put it, that the teaching of the Prophet
Mohammed "was final, you can't add to it, can't take away from it."
But it also tends to be nonpolitical, emphasizing personal religious commitment
and observance more than conflict with nonbelievers or the less devout.
In his time with the Tablighi, Shahid said, he heard not a word
from them promoting violence or terrorism. Among the students a few may have
leaned toward that ideology; Shahid remembers one young man who spoke about
going somewhere to buy guns. "He asked me if I wanted to go. I said no,
no thanks, I don't want no part of that. I was just trying learn about Islam
at that point... anything I learned, guns didn't have any part in it. So he
left, and then no one heard from him again."
The program was supposed to last four months,
but halfway through, Shahid's bipolar symptoms worsened -- "something
flipped in my brain," he said -- so he flew back to the United States
after just two months away. I wondered what happened when he came through
the airport. This was less than a year after 9/11, and here was a young Muslim
man coming back from two months in Pakistan, whose passport photo showed him
as clean-shaven and was now wearing a full, bushy black beard, and who was
acting strangely to boot. Surely, I thought, he'd have been pulled out of
the passport control line to be grilled. But remarkably, he wasn't. Other
passengers were stopped and searched, he told me with an amazed laugh, but
"I went through like nothing. I came through, they searched my bag. I
had this whole big thing of water from Mecca that my aunt had given me to
bring here, so they're 'what's this?' I said that's holy water. So they let
me go. See you later. Didn't check nothing. Have a nice day."
Whatever charm got Shahid through the immigration control at the
airport was apparently still working a short while later when he was hospitalized
for his bipolar disorder. Somewhere in the process of his admission, when
he was explaining about his trip to Pakistan, a nurse or technician making
notes for his file wrote "Taliban" instead of "Tablighi."
A doctor noticed the word and came back to ask about it, then corrected the
file when Shahid explained. Investigators from some law enforcement agency
did come to talk to one of his uncles after that, but oddly, Shahid himself
was never questioned.

While he was still in Pakistan, Shahid wrote in his journal that
with all he had learned, "I’ll have such a strong iman [faith,
or true belief] when I get back that nothing can touch me." But his life
after coming home was not as straightforward as he had imagined. Along with
outward upheavals -- his stint in a psychiatric hospital, continuing mental
health problems, divorce from his first wife and painful conflict over their
children -- his inner life was uneven too. Instead of staying strong, his
belief "bounced up and down," he said, and he didn't consistently
practice as strictly as he had been taught.
When Shahid married again, it was a somewhat
modernized version of an arranged marriage, which is still quite common in
the Pakistani American community. A Pakistani immigrant who came to work for
his father had unmarried daughters in Pakistan, and agreed with Shahid's father
that one of them, Sadaf, should come and marry his son. The two got engaged,
long distance, and after about a year of telephone calls and internet chats,
Sadaf flew to the United States and the couple were married a few days later.
At the time Shahid was not practicing much, and Sadaf, when she arrived, was
not particularly devout either. But somehow his marriage pulled Shahid back
to a religious life. He began studying again and attending mosque regularly,
and after a while, so did Sadaf. After taking some classes and reading religious
texts, he said, she began covering her hair again, which she had stopped doing
when she came to America, and quit her job in a bank, because receiving interest
is not allowed in Islam. When I met her, the morning after my first conversation
with Shahid, Sadaf was wearing a hijab and an abaya, the floor-length cloak
commonly worn by women in the Middle East. She is hoping to get licensed as
a day care provider, she told me, in the apartment she and Shahid are remodeling.
That way she can earn some money while also taking care of their three small
children.
Shahid wanted to make very sure that
I understood that the changes his wife had made were her decision, not made
at his order. "What I learned is that there's no compulsion in Islam,"
he told me. "If she decided not to cover, I can't force her, because
then she's not doing it for God, she's doing it for me, so if she's doing
it for me, that's not Islam. That's something other than Islam. For her to
cover or to do anything in regard to religion, is her choice. I can tell her,
I can advise her, but what she chooses do is on her. I'm not going to get
the sin, if I tell her to do something that is according to religion. It's
my duty to advise her. If she chooses to do it or not, it's nothing I can
force. I can't force anything." His own preference, he added, would be
for her to wear the niqab, the veil that covers the face. But he doesn't expect
her to do that; "she's not that type."
Something else Shahid wanted me to understand
is that his religion does not approve or tolerate violent acts of terror or
embrace those who practice violence. When I asked if he felt his religious
awakening was at all related to the 9/11 attacks, he nodded. "In a way,"
he said. "I wanted to know why people were doing this.... I went to learn
what Islam is all about." And what he learned, he went on, is that "attacks,
stuff like that, have nothing to do with Islam. Any of the books that I read,
they condemned people doing this. I hear a lot of people saying oh, these
Muslims, when things like this happen, they don't say nothing. They don't
say nothing to the mainstream media, but if you go in that store" (a
religious bookstore in a small shopping arcade across the street from the
mosque where we met) "and you read those books that scholars published
for Muslims to read, they're telling Muslims, you can't do these things...
in Islam, what I learned is that to kill one person that is innocent is like
killing all of humanity, so that's not a good thing. And to kill yourself
also is a big sin, like suicide bombers and stuff like that."
The Muslims who support terrorist organizations
don't know their own faith, Shahid added. They are products of a culture that
tells them to blindly follow what they are told, without thinking or learning
for themselves what the religion really teaches.

Perhaps it's because of his own mixed heritage and his fondness
for his Christian grandmother in Georgia, who Shahid remembers "was not
at all prejudiced in any type of way" and often challenged racist comments
from others in her all-white neighborhood. Or perhaps it's just his nature,
but Shahid seems remarkably free of the intolerance and closed-circle life
that can often go with a strong religious commitment. His close friends include
a family of Pakistani Christians, who are widely treated by Pakistanis as
a despised minority. He doesn't share the common prejudice in the South Asian
community against African Americans. "I always kept an open mind growing
up because I been around so many different types of people," he told
me. "I never really judged people by way they look."
Americans don't always treat him the same way. Once on a construction
job a plumber, a former marine, walked up to him and said, "if anything
like September 11 happens again, I'm killing you and all the people like you."
Shahid recalls another odd encounter in a Motor Vehicles Department office
where he went to deal with some issue about his license or car registration.
He was wearing a skullcap and robe that day, and when he started to tell the
clerk at the counter what he needed, she said, "Can you please speak
English?" Nonplused, Shahid began to say that he'd been speaking English,
but the clerk got up, flounced over to a coworker and said in a loud voice,
"I can't understand a word this guy's saying!" That story struck
me as a remarkable little study in the physiology of fear and what it can
do to the senses. English is Shahid's native language; he speaks it entirely
naturally and without any trace of a foreign accent, but for that woman behind
the counter, his bearded face and Muslim dress must have looked like her mental
picture of a terrorist, and the horror and fear from that visual image was
so powerful that it apparently overwhelmed her other senses, including her
ability to hear that the words he was saying were in her own language.
Mostly, Shahid shrugs off that kind of episode. "Don't argue
with the foolish," says a maxim in one of the Islamic scholars' books
he read, and he tries to live by it. That's of a piece with a more general
search for a calm life. With his wife's help he is being far more careful
to take the medications that control his bipolar disorder, and he is also
better at taking things easy and not getting fatigued, which can bring on
manic episodes. He doesn't pay attention to the news, just keeps focused on
his family, his religious duties, and understanding Islam. "I'm learning
as much as I can, implementing what I learn, according to religion,"
he said, "and I've found so much peace, tranquillity." Life in Pakistan
would be simpler than life in America, he believes, so he is thinking of moving
there.
Listening to Shahid's story, it occurred to me that he almost
perfectly matched the profile for young Muslims who are targeted by terrorist
recruiters, or by trolling undercover security agents. A young man confused
about his identity, with a chaotic personal life and mental health problems,
and looking for guidance about his religion, represents exactly what is considered
the prototype of a potential jihadist -- Mohammad Hassan Khalid, for example.
I wondered, if the three bearded guys he ran into on that Albany street had
not been from Tablighi Jamaat but from al-Qaeda, or from some other violent
extremist movement, whether Shahid might have been drawn into that world.
But when I asked him exactly that question, he shook his head. "I was
always against that kind of stuff. It's just like my nature, I realized you
can't kill innocent people, it's not good. So even if someone like that were
to have come up to me, even with the limited knowledge that I had about Islam,
most likely I wouldn't have gotten involved in something like that."

-0-

The Pakistani and Afghan Americans
I met whose religious commitment has become stronger in America clearly represent
a significant trend in those communities. But not everyone reflected that
trend. Some have grown distant or fallen away altogether from their Muslim
faith, like the Pakistan-born son and daughter of a mother who left her homeland
to escape an unsatisfactory arranged marriage and eventually became a lawyer
for a U.S. government agency. The children were 5 and 8 when they arrived
with their mother in America. (She decided to emigrate because if she remained
in Pakistan after divorcing her husband, he would have automatically gotten
custody of both children, the son immediately and the daughter as soon as
she reached puberty.) The children are both now in their 40s. Both are lawyers
like their mother, and both are married to non-Muslim Americans. The daughter,
Saira, married a strongly believing Roman Catholic and some years after her
marriage converted to Catholicism; their two children are being brought up
in that faith. The son, whose Urdu name is Iftikhar but has adopted Andrew
as his professional name, married a woman from a nominally Christian but non-observant
family with German and Slovenian roots. He follows some Muslim rules, such
as not eating pork, his mother said, but the family has no affiliation with
any organized religious community and his children are not being raised as
Muslims. The mother, whose name is Shaheda
Sultan, has taken her own spiritual journey away from formal religious practice.
For most of her life, including most of her years in America, Sultan was moderately
observant, like the family she grew up in. But seven or eight years ago, something
led her to reexamine her beliefs. The increasingly conservative religious
climate she encountered both on visits to Pakistan and among a sizeable number
of Muslims in America was disturbing and, Sultan said, not consistent with
Islamic principles as she understood them -- on small things, like one imam's
ruling that nail polish is un-Islamic (because it keeps out water and thus
prevents proper ablution before prayer), and on larger matters such as growing
restrictions on women, which Sultan believes do not really reflect the teachings
of the Koran but are promoted and used by men "to control their wives
to a point that my mother and I were never controlled by our husbands."
After a period of extensive reading and thought about her own and other faiths,
she said, she decided that "the interpretations given to Islam as it
is practiced by the vast majority, not extremists but the vast majority,"
were interpretations she could no longer accept. "I seriously said to
myself, OK, I cannot practice any such religion." Her decision is actually compatible
with Sunni Muslim tradition, Sultan believes, which allows people to find
their own paths to moral principle and practice. "In Sunni Islam... each
Muslim is free to communicate directly with God, to read the Koran and draw
whatever interpretation they want out of it. I have chosen the path of believing
in God but not practicing any particular religion. I practice by following
the Ten Commandments, for example. I believe in doing good, but I don't spread
out a prayer mat and say the required prayers."
Sultan makes some effort to keep her children and grandchildren
connected with their Pakistani heritage -- for example, by holding an annual
gathering for the Eid al-Adha holiday,[3]
with everyone dressed in Pakistani costume. She is gratified that her Catholic
granddaughter likes to bring Pakistani ornaments or cookware for show-and-tell
programs at her Catholic school, and very proud that the same granddaughter
stood up in the classroom and challenged one of her teachers, a priest, who
had made a disparaging and inaccurate comment about Islamic beliefs. But to
all appearances Sultan has no sense of sadness or loss at her children's and
their children's passage into a generally unhyphenated American identity --
a passage that in a way mirrors her path away from identifying with any sectarian
religion, and toward defining her own way to live by what she believes.
I also met people who observe
religious rituals as a way of expressing their heritage, but not religious
belief, and others who follow the rules selectively or hardly at all. Most
continue to call themselves Muslims, because it's the identity they were born
with or perhaps only because that's what everyone else assumes they are. "I'm
a cultural Muslim," one Afghan American woman told me. "I celebrate
the holidays, I might even fast here and there. It's solidarity with the community,
respect for the religion. But I'm not a believer, I don't believe in organized
religion." She added, with a rueful smile, that it would sound awkward
even in her own ears to identify herself as Afghan without being Muslim. "To
say you're Afghan and not Muslim is an extremely difficult sentence. It's
much easier to say I'm Muslim and Afghan, because the two go in one sentence."
Among the believing Muslims I spoke with, not all have joined
the movement toward more conservative beliefs and practices. Sahar Habib Ghazi
is one example. "I identify as Muslim, I choose to be Muslim," Ghazi
told me. But the faith she identifies with is very different from the one
she has seen develop among many American Muslims of her generation, a version
of Islam that is "very influenced by Arab culture, and conservative."
Ghazi was born in Long Island, New York, then moved to Pakistan at 9 years
old when her parents decided to return there -- not without difficulties in
adjustment that in many respects, she acknowledged with a smile, represented
the immigrant experience in reverse. When she came back to the United States
to go to college, she found pressures on her university campus in America
that she had never encountered while living in Pakistan. There, she said,
if she was praying in public during Ramadan or at a funeral or some other
occasion, nobody would approach her to criticize her for not dressing appropriately.
In Pakistan, there was "no one coming up to me and saying oh, you're
not covered properly... no one saying where your arms should be covered. That's
not how I learned to pray. I always just put a loose thing on my head, draped
it and prayed. That's how my mom prayed and that's how my grandmother prayed.
But the first time I went here to a mosque, three people told me I should
cover up properly.... This was when I was in college, in Ann Arbor. I think
it was during Eid prayers or something."
Instead of being drawn to stricter
observance, Ghazi, now in her early 30s, was put off by attitudes that she
feels are meant to enforce surface conformity rather than the moral principles
that should be at the center of religious belief. After that experience at
the mosque in Michigan, "I said, I'm not going back to one of these places,
I don't need to be subjected to judgment by people who don't know anything
about religion. That was my reaction to these things, being 18 years old.
And I kind of hold to that," she added. She remains a believing Muslim,
but on her own terms, and in the more liberal Sufi-influenced tradition that
she inherited from her parents. In California, where she and her husband now
live, "we've never been to a mosque. Even on Eid, we don't go." The most outspoken nonbeliever
I met was Masood Haque, who makes his living as an emergency room doctor in
New York's Westchester County but combines that with his real love, filmmaking.
His parents, who brought him and his brother and sisters to the United States
in the late 1970s when he was 13, are practicing Muslims, but none of their
children are, Haque said. Nor are his children or his American-born nieces
and nephews. "In my family," he told me, "the only people who
are religious are the Catholics" -- his brother's Irish-American wife
and their children, who were baptized in the Catholic faith although the brother
himself, like Haque, remains a nonbeliever. Haque is now married to a Pakistani
but his first marriage was also to a Christian, though a non-practicing one,
and they didn't bring up their son in any religion. His oldest niece is married
to a Jew, which Haque said "would be a shocking scandal in Pakistan."
Living in a multicultural society
-- the same experience that has driven other Muslims to identify more strongly
with their faith -- led Haque to reject not just Islam but all dogmatic religion,
which he came to see as the cause of intolerance and conflict and a burden
on people's lives. "I think culturally I'm a Muslim, because I come from
family that observes traditions, this is what my upbringing was," he
said. But he doesn't consider himself a Muslim in terms of religious belief.
"If anything, I've read about Buddhism and I find myself much more attuned
to their philosophy than Islam." By coincidence, I met Masood
Haque and Shahid Bhatti on the same day, with just a couple of hours driving
time in between. The distance between the paths they had taken, one to secularism
and nonbelief and the other to strict, almost unworldly piety, was astronomically
greater. Their two stories reflect how many different paths there are for
Muslim Americans to find on the chaotically diverse terrain of this country.
What they show is that three-quarters of a million Pakistani and Afghan Americans
and several million other Muslims in the United States are not just a challenge
to American pluralism. They are also its mirror.

[2]
A hijab covers the hair and neck, but not the face. A more conservative
veil is the niqab, which covers the lower face, leaving only the
eyes and part of the forehead exposed. Most concealing of all is the burqa,
a full-length garment that hoods the head and the entire body with a small
mesh panel in front of the face for the wearer to look out through.

[3]
Not to be confused with Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan.
Eid al-Adha, also called the Feast of Sacrifice, celebrates the story of
Ibrahim and his willingness to obey God by sacrificing his son Ishmael --
the story also told in the Old Testament, with the names rendered as Abraham
and Isaac.